HCID-101 • Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction
M2R Interaction • Fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction

2014-2015

Lectures: building 640 (PUIO), room D203 (Wednesday 9am-12pm)
Instructor: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon mbl@lri.fr
TAs: Ghita Jalal, Daniel Strazzulla, room D201 / D203 (Thursday 9am-12pm) - web site
Exam Date 26 November, 9am-12pm

The only allowed document for the exam is one two-sided A4 sheet with your own handwritten notes.

This page and its content are solely for students enrolled in the 2014-2015 HCID and Interaction Masters at Université Paris-Sud. It contains instructor's material (slides and audio recordings) that are not to be distributed without the author's written consent, and copyrighted materials (such as articles) that are only made available under the fair use exception to copyright law.

Lecture 1: Wednesday 24 September, 9am-12pm, D203

Lecture 2: Wednesday 1 October, 9am-12pm, D203
TA 1: Thursday 2 October, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

TA 2: Thursday 9 October, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

Lecture 3: Tuesday 14 October, 2pm-5pm, B107
TA 3: Wednesday 15 October, 9am-12pm, D201-D203
TA 4: Thursday 16 October, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

Lecture 4: Tuesday 21 October, 2pm-5pm, B107
Lecture 5: Wednesday 22 October, 9am-12pm, D203

Lecture 6: Wednesday 29 October, 9am-12pm, D203
TA 5: Thursday 30 November, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

Lecture 7: Wednesday 5 November, 9am-12pm, D203
TA 6: Thursday 6 November, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

Lecture 8: Wednesday 12 November, 9am-12pm, D203
TA 7: Thursday 13 November, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

TA 8: Thursday 20 November, 9am-12pm, D201-D203

Former exams (please note that the content of the course has changed over the years)

• In French: 1999 - 2000 - 2001 - 2002 - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008
• In English: 2005 - 2009 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013

Course Summary

This is a joint course between the first year of the ICT Labs Master in Human-Computer Interaction and Design and the second year Specialty in Interaction of the Research Master in Computer Science.

The course gives an overview of the field of human-computer interaction, including a short history of HCI, a review of interaction styles, basic elements of psychology and software engineering for HCI, an in-depth analysis of graphical interaction, a sampling of post-WIMP interaction techniques, the notion of conceptual modeling, and a range of theories and models for HCI.

Lecture 1 — 24 September 2014 — Introduction and History of HCI

Handouts

• Introduction
• A Brief History of HCI

Audio recordings

• Introduction
• A Brief History of HCI

Videos shown in class

• SketchPad
• NLS/Augment short segment on groupware - Full video of The "mother of all demos" - Edited version

Note: some videos don't play in the browser and must be downloaded to view them with VLC.

Readings

Papers about visions:

• As we May Think. Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, 1947
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Douglas Engelbart, SRI Report, 1962 (original report)
• The Computer for the 21st Century. Mark Weiser, Scientific American, 1991
• Interaction is more Powerful than Algorithms. Peter Wegner, Communications of the ACM, 1997
• Interacting in Chaos. Dan Olsen, ACM Interactions, 1999

Historical papers:

• The Xerox Star: a Retrospective. Jeff Johnson et al., IEEE Computer, 1989
• The Making of the Mouse. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Invention&Technology, 2002.
• Inventing the Lisa User Interface. Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith Keller and Frank Ludolph, ACM Interactions, 1997 (see the figures here)
• A Brief History of Human-Computer Interaction Technology. Brad Myers, ACM Interactions, 1998

Historical videos:

• SketchPad
• NLS/Augment short segment on groupware - Full video of The "mother of all demos" - Edited version
• Xerox Star introduction video - Video of the Star User Interface (1984) - Video of the "Last Xerox Star Demo" (1998)

Note: some videos don't play in the browser and must be downloaded to view them with VLC.

About innovation and invention:

• Innovation vs. Invention. Bill Buxton, Business Week, 2005
• The Long Nose of Innovation. Bill Buxton, Business Week, 2009
• Modeling and Forecasting the Information Sciences. Brian Gaines, Information Sciences, 1999

Lecture 2 — 1 October 2014 — Interaction styles, Psychology 101

Handouts

• Interaction styles
• Psychology 101 (part 1)

Audio recordings

• Interaction styles
• Psychology 101

Videos shown in class

• Apple Knowledge Navigator (1987)
• Myron Krueger - Video Place (1988)
• Rich Bolt / Chris Schmandt - Put-that-there (1979)
• Pierre Wellner - Digital Desk (1993)

"Vision" videos

• Microsoft Future Vision 2009 (Silverlight version)
• Microsoft Future Vision 2011 (Silverlight version)

Readings in Interaction Styles

• Direct Manipulation Interfaces. Ed Hutchins, James Hollan & Don Norman, HCI Journal, 1985.
• Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents. Ben Shneiderman & Pattie Maes, ACM Interactions, 1997.
• Augmented Reality: Linking Real and Virtual Worlds. Wendy Mackay, Proc. Advanced Visual Interfaces, 1998.
• Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. Hiroshi Ishii & Brygg Ullmer, Proc. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'97), 1997.

Videos about gesture-based interaction:

• Bill Buxton - Multitouch tablet (1985)
• Minority report (2002) - scene with gesture-based interface
• Jeff Han - TED talk on multitouch interface (2006)
• Leap Motion (2012)

Readings in Psychology

General psychology:

• Behaviorism
• Cognitivism
• Gestalt perception
• James J. Gibson

Visual system:

• Held & Hein's experiment
• Preattentive processing (from Perception in Visualization)

Visual illusions:

• Ames room
• 99 Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions
• Mighty Optical Illusions
• Hermann's Grid (my personal favorite) - see explanation here

Auditory illusion:

• Shepard-Risset tone: an infinite glissando (see also this page and the wikipedia page)

Motor system:

• The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement. Paul Fitts. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1954. (See also the wikipedia page)
• Fitts' Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction. Scott Mackenzie. HCI Journal, 1992.
• Asymmetric Division of Labo in Human Skilled Bimanuel Action: The Kinematic Chain as a Model. Yves Guiard, Journal of Motor Behaviour, 1987.

Lecture 3 — 14 October 2014 — Graphical Interaction

Handouts

• Psychology 101 (part 2)
• Graphical Interaction

Audio recordings

• Psychology 101 (part 2) - Graphical Interaction (part 1)
• Graphical Interaction (part 2)

Readings in Psychology

Memory:

• Types of memory (from The Human Memory)
• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. George A. Miller, Psychology Review, 1955. (see also the wikipedia page)
• The Forgetting Pill - article from Wired Magazine, february 2012

Cognition:

• Action theory, Don Norman
• Plans and Situated Actions, Lucy Suchman.
• Situated cognition

Lecture 4 — 21 October 2014 — Pointing and Multiscale navigation

Handouts

• Pointing and Navigation

Audio recordings

• Pointing and Navigation (part 1)
• Pointing and Navigation (part 2)

Videos & demos shown in class

• Semantic pointing (click the demo link to get to the Java applet)
• Bubble cursor (video)
• Crossy

More videos

• Drag'n'pop
• Dynaspot (video)
• Pad++
• OrthoZoom

Readings

• Fitt's Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction, I. Scott MacKenzie, Human-Computer Interaction, 1992.
• "Beating" Fitts' law: Virtual Enhancements for Pointing Facilitation, R. Balakrishnan, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 2004.
• Pad - An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Perlin & Fox, SIGGRAPH 1992.

Lecture 5 — 22 October 2014 — Instrumental Interaction

Handouts

• Instrumental Interaction

Audio recordings

• Instrumental Interaction

UIST 2014 videos shown in class

The video previews of the papers presented at UIST 2014 are available

• on the conference web site (click an entry to see the abstract and preview);
• on the ACM Digital Library (click the Table of Contents tab, and then click on a title);
• on the ACM YouTube Channel: Monday Video Previews, Tuesday Video Previews, Wednesday Video Previews

The full videos require an ACM DL subscription, but can also often be found on the author's web site (use Google with the article title).

The following videos were shown in class:

• FlexSense: A Transparent Self-Sensing Deformable Surface
• Graffiti Fur: Turning Your Carpet into a Computer Display
• LightRing: Always-Available 2D Input on Any Surface
• WristFlex: Low-Power Gesture Input with Wrist-Worn Pressure Sensors
• PrintScreen: Fabricating Highly Customizable Thin-film Touch-Displays
• GaussStones: Shielded Magnetic Tangibles for Multi-Token Interactions on Portable Displays
• Trampoline: A Double-sided Elastic Touch Device for Creating Reliefs
• Skin Buttons: Cheap, Small, Low-Powered and Clickable Fixed-Icon Laser Projectors
• Kitty: Sketching Dynamic and Interactive Illustrations
• Physical Telepresence: Shape Capture and Display for Embodied, Computer-mediated Remote Collaboration
• 3D-Board: A Whole-body Remote Collaborative Whiteboard
• Air+Touch: Interweaving Touch & In-Air Gestures
• Vibkinesis: Notification by Direct Tap and ‘Dying Message’ Using Vibronic Movement Controllable Smartphones
• Sensing Techniques for Tablet+Stylus Interaction
• Pinch-to-Zoom-Plus: An enhanced pinch-to-zoom that reduces clutching and panning
• RoomAlive: Magical Experiences Enabled by Scalable, Adaptive Projector-Camera Units
• HaptoMime: Mid-Air Haptic Interaction with a Floating Virtual Screen

Videos and demos shown in class

• CPN200
• Zip archive containing 3 Tcl/Tk demos that can be run from the terminal, assuming you have installed the Tcl/Tk (installed by default on Mac OS X):
  % wish indirect.tcl   - direct vs. indirect manipulation
  % wish search.tcl     - instrumental text search
  % wish guidelines.tcl - magnetic guidelines

Readings

• Instrumental Interaction: An Interaction Model for Designing Post-WIMP Interfaces, Beaudouin-Lafon, ACM CHI 2000.
• Reification, Polymorphism and Reuse: Three Design Principles for Designing Visual Interfaces, Beaudouin-Lafon & Mackay
• The Architecture and Implementation of CPN2000, A Post-WIMP Graphical Application, Beaudouin-Lafon & Lassen, ACM UIST 2000. CPNtools web site.

Lecture 6 — 29 October 2014 — Conceptual modeling

Handouts

• Conceptual modeling

Audio recordings

• Conceptual modeling (part 1)
• Conceptual modeling (part 2)

Readings

• Don Norman - The Design of Everyday Things
• Carelman - Catalogue des objets introuvables - see also images from the original edition and an online version based on his later exhibit and the book.
• Planar maps: An Interaction Paradigm for Graphic Design, P. Baudelaire & M. Gangnet, CHI'89 - for the maths behind it: Incremental Computation of Planar Maps, M. Gangnet et al, SIGGRAPH'89.
• Histomages - Manipulate images histograms like images, F. Chevalier et al., UIST 2012 - video

Lecture 7 — 5 November 2014 — Theories and models in HCI

Handouts

• Theories and models in HCI

Audio recordings

• Theories and models in HCI (part 1)
• Theories and models in HCI (part 2)

Readings

• Karl Popper. His most famous book:
  The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks, John Carroll (Ed). Available also on ScienceDirect. I used this book extensively to prepare this lecture.

Action and perception:

• Pre-attentive processing (infovis wiki). Research paper:
  Search asymmetry: A diagnostic for preattentive processing of separable features, A. Treisman and J. Souther, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1985.
• Gestalt perception
• Ecological Psychology. James J. Gibson's seminal book:
  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (also on Google Books)
• Hick's law (also known as Hick-Hyman law). Research paper:
  On the rate of gain of information, W.E. Hick, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1952.
• Fitts' law. Research paper:
  The Information Capacity of the Human Motor System in Controlling the Amplitude of Movement, P. Fitts, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1954.
  Fitts' Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction. Scott Mackenzie, HCI Journal, 1992.
• Kinematic chain - this entry describes the general concept of a kinematic chain.
  Asymmetric Division of Labo in Human Skilled Bimanuel Action: The Kinematic Chain as a Model, Y. Guiard, Journal of Motor Behaviour, 1987. Research paper about kinematic chain and bimanual interaction.
  A study in two-handed input, W. Buxton and B. Myers, Proc. ACM CHI'86, 1986. The first study of bimanual input (HTML version).
  Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface, E. Bier et al., Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 93, 1993. An advanced bimanual interface using Guiard's principles. Video

Cognition and behaviour:

• Action Theory, from The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman, 2002. The revised edition is not out yet.
• Plans and Situated Action, Lucy Suchman. PDF version.
  Human-Machine Reconfigurations, recently revised version of the above.
• Activity Theory
  Beyond the Interface: Encountering Artifacts in Use, L. Bannon and S. Bodker, in Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface, 1991. Introduced Activity Theory into HCI.
  Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, V. Kaptelenin and B. Nardi, 2009. A recent book on activity theory and HCI.
  The Human-Artifact Model - an Activity Theory Approach to Artifact Ecologies, S. Bødker and C. Klokmose, Human-Computer Interaction, 2011.
• Cognitive Dimensions of Notation. Research paper:
  Notational Systems – the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework, A. Blackwell and T. Green, in HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks, 2003.
  Web site with additional resources.

HCI models and theories:

• A Morphological Analysis of the Design Space of Input Devices, S. Card et al., ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, 1991.
• The UAN: a user-oriented representation for direct manipulation interface designs, R. Hartson, A. Siochi and D. Hix, ACM Trans. Office Information Systems, 1990.
• SwingStates: Adding state machines to Java and the Swing toolkit, C. Appert and M. Beaudouin-Lafon. Jal Software Practice and Experience, 2008.
  Web site with downloadable library and examples.

Lecture 8 — 12 November 2014 — User Interface Toolkits

Handouts

• User Interface Toolkits

Audio recordings

• Theories and models in HCI (part 3)
• User Interface Toolkits

Readings

HCI models and theories:

• GOMS, Keystroke-level model
  The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, S. Card, T. Moran and A. Newell, 1983.
  Project Ernestine: A validation of GOMS for prediction and explanation of real-world task performance W. Gray et al., Human-Computer Interaction, 1993.
  Extensions of GOMS analyses to expert performance requiring perception of dynamic visual and auditory information, B. John, Proc. ACM CHI'90, 1990.
• Instrumental Interaction: An Interaction Model for Designing Post-WIMP Interfaces, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, Proc. ACM CHI 2000, 2000.

Software engineering:

• User Interface Management Systems: Present and Future, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, Eurographics, 1994.
• MVC, see also history of MVC
  A cookbook for using the model-view controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80, G. Krasner and S. Pope, Jal Object-Oriented Programming, 1988.
• PAC
  PAC, an Object-Oriented Model for Dialog Design, J. Coutaz, Proc. INTERACT 87, 1987.

Videos to watch

Interface builder

• XCode interface builder demo - See also Apple web site

Advanced window systems

• Metisse is not a 3D Desktop! - For more info: Metisse window system (web page)
• User interface facades
• Prezi: Zoomable Presentation software - Sample presentation

Programming interaction

• Bret Victor's home page - Tangle - Learnable Programming - Inventing on Principle (video)